The present disclosure relates to a network device that processes packets.
The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in the background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
As part of a data packet forwarding operation, network devices store data related to addresses for forwarding packets. The addresses are stored as attributes including information about a destination, such as a target port, a target MAC address, a priority, a VLAN, etc.
Further, a plurality of attributes corresponding to one forwarding address is stored by the network device as an element. In an example of a forwarding operation, the element is linked to one or more other elements as a linked list. Each of these other elements respectively corresponds to another forwarding address to which to forward a data packet.